In episode 5 of the “How I tech” series, I deep dive into how I use my laptop. What role does a device like this still perform in a world filled with mobile devices. The story of how a discarded HP Probook was fished out of a dumpster and given a second lease on life as “my lappie”
Full Transcript.
If I ever think about “my laptop”, I can’t help going back to the audiobook I listed to of “Pirate Cinema”. Cory Doctorrows masterpiece on piracy, dumpsterdiving and squatting. A coming of age novel where our protagonist runs away from home to become a derelict-squatting-movie-remixing-copyright-breaking-hobo that fights the system on “His Lappie”. A bundled together piece of tech, discarded as useless e-waste that is the cornerstone of his digital rebellion. A hidden cry against consumerism, a tip of the hat that users (and not manufacturers ) decide when hardware is “outdated”
That intimate relationship with a worn-down but still valuable piece of technology struck a cord with me. For one, the digital minimalism of it all. Just ONE machine. In todays detritus of usb-c-powered devices we need to ask the question: What do we actually need. Because let’s face it: Since 2010 hardware specifications were no longer in par with what the average user needs. Surf the web, type a text document? You can do that just fine on a five year old machine, hell, even on a 10 year old potato if you really wanted to. It’s a good thing Operating Systems are bloating like balloons and have a ton of crapware pre-installed accompanied by and an Antivirus that keeps your CPU occupied like the paranoid elderly lady down the street. Because let’s face it, your computer would be horribly overpowered. Unless you are a gamer or a content producer you can ask yourself the question: Do I actually NEED a Pc ? But i’m being judgemental, so instead of ranting i’ll tell you what I do with my pc.
As a former cross platform slider I learned long ago that a ‘laptop’ is just an interface. A way you interact with your data. A device that should be easy to swap out and replace if you need it. So it’s been a loooong time since I had any personal connection to a specific machine. Long gone are the days of my Snowbook, (The very first Intel Macbook Pro’s ) where my relationship to that specific machine, that opened up a world called “podcasting” was very much like the relationship between the main character of Pirate Cinema and his “lappy”. Today my personal laptop is an interface that connects to my digital landscape but that draws both it’s power and it’s data from companion devices (more on that later) and the ubiquitous cloud. There is never any data on the drives that is not accessible anywhere else … there is no functionality that only the laptop can preform. It’s killer feature is the big keyboard, the large screen, the hardware architecture it runs on and specific software that might not be available on my other devices (which is pretty scarse.)
The OS
Fully inline with the “Pirate cinema vibe” my “main laptop” for this series is a discarded Probook somebody threw in the trash. It has a 15 inch display, an 8th gen I5; 8 gigs of ram and a 256 gig SSD. According to my “dumpster diving” scale this machine rates as pretty “fresh”. By modern market standards it’s 6 years old and “obsolete”
The operating system I chose to impart upon this meager tramp is “Plain Debian” with an Mate 2 GUI. A carefully made choice based on different factors. I’ll motivate it by telling you why I didn’t go with the alternatives
Why NOT Windows:
Ah, this one is pretty obvious right? First of all: Hardware limitations. 8 gigs of Ram and Windows 11 may play together, but do it very very slowly. I’m in no mood to re-experience the sluggishness of modern day Windows that probably prompted the previous owner of this machine to chuck it in the bin. Furthermore, modern day Windows is a far cry from the sleek and fairly fast XP. (Fast being a relative term for the day). The pre-installed bloatware that gets shipped with a “fresh” version of Windows annoys me to no end. (Never mind what OEM resellers smack on those machines). The way Edge and Co-pilot get force fed down your throat makes me feel like a Duck in a Foie Grass farm. In the wonderful irony of history “Windows” smells like “IBM” in the 80’s. A company Microsoft was so eager to beat. This a pattern that is all over big-tech these days. ( Digital rebels fighting the big corporate overlords, have now become the Market Mastodons they swore to bring down.) In that regard Windows no longer feels like a personal computer OS. I feel like i’m using a terminal while an eager marketing and sales department looks over my shoulder at what i’m doing. Trying to upsell me pre-installed versions of software, or selling my user data to third parties. In a new update Microsoft changed the name of the “my computer” icon, to “computer”. I think that says a lot.
So why not Ubuntu ?
A very valid question. I’ve been using Ubuntu since one of the first versions came out in 2005 and it got me really into Linux (and helped me introduce Linux to others as well). Today Ubuntu is still one of the better and most supported Linux versions out there. One of the reasons I didn’t pick it was because I don’t like modern day Gnome.
Now I know I could have run just about any desktop interface on this machine, so the second reason is Canonicals choice to go with “snap packages first”. I’ll go into what these are later, but think of them as a way to install apps the easy way by sandboxing them (like the apps on your phone). All perfectly fine, but I would like the make the choice of which packaging system I use (there are several out there).
I also wanted to go “as pirate as possible” by picking an OS that is mostly community supported and not from a company that is run but yet another millionaire. I know it sounds political, which is always a dumb motivator when it comes to making hardware and software choices. If you wanna make point go get a stick, a bucket of paint and a sign.
So why not arch.
So yeah, why not start up my own version of a linux-meth lab and cook my own little Linux from scratch. I’m sure with the help of the interwebs I would be more than able to Heisenberg my way into compiling a kernel, smashing on my own X-Server and go for a niche window manager that nobody ever heard about. I will give me tons of geek cred and bragging rights at the next street barbecue before I bore half my neighbours to death and alienate the other half. Erm.. well: Because I have a life, a hobby and the goal of actually doing something WITH my computer instead of doting over it like some kind of Dr Frankenstein with a hardware-hardon.
The stuff I run on it.
My browser
After many hours of research and trying on just about every major alternative in the book I went with Vivaldi. There are 2 reasons I went for this browser: Vertical tabs on the left, and the ability to launch webapps in a bar on the right. add some elegantly simple screenshotting ability and a door-to-door searchbar and bob is your uncle. The setting that syncs your settings across different installs is a little wonky but I just have one machine .. So that is that.
Terminal
I love any app with a decent TUI Interface. That’s partly nostalgia. I have (misguided) romantic memories on the times before our entire interaction with the digital world around us was not a matter of shoving around a mono-balled rodent with a serial cable. The blinking cursor of my first commodore 64, the bios beeps of the the IBM Clones … it was a time when “the terminal” was the default. Nostalgia aside, the second reason I like apps with a Text User Interface is because of their geek cred. You look a lot cooler when you are rattling away at a command line than when you are scrolling puppies on Instagram. But knowing where the tilde sign is on the keyboard is no guarantee to get you laid.
But mostly it’s about the minimalism of it all. Apps that you run from the terminal have less visual clutter. Your keystroke to mouseclick ratio per minute clearly shows the advantage to the former and that means: Get more done, faster.
So of course the way that terminal looks needs to be nice. Cool-Retro-Term is an app that allows you not only to emulate retro terminals (CRT Scan Lines, Fuzz, Lightbleed and curvature included), so that in the age of modern computers you can find another way to get a migraine or ruin your eyesight. But you can tweak those features down and get a nice customised moody terminal. It has some class …
`
Audio Recording
Audacity has been my goto app for audio recording on linux for two decades now. Using it today is a matter of practicality. I know where all the buttons are and how do do all the audio editing I need for the podcast. Some noise reduction, a compressor and snipping out all the farts and fuckups that come out of my orphises during recording. The app has enshittified over the years trying to force your data up to some dodgy cloud service, but just like a pushy date that tries to get to second base before desert, you can always say NO.
Video Recording
For the longest time the quickest way to record a video with some basic form of branding en editing was OBS. trusty sidekick both professionally and in my free time, OBS can quickly turn into a quick-and-tidy movie recording studio. Good for quick video recordings, screen-demo’s and impressing the crap out of your boring fellow zoom mates.
All the editing is done “on the fly”, switching scenes, adding overlays, media and audio sources, b-Rol and more. Why do i love this? Because there isn’t any decent video editor available on linux that is both functional, stable and has the ability to edit and render a video without crashing at least 4 times or having a render time that equals at least half the time it takes the universe to do a pirouette.
Writing
When I need to convert the electrical impulses in my brain to magnetically stored charges on some storage media, I need something simple. Because to me there is no greater enemy to creativity than clutter. This is why I hate things like Word. Infernal rows of buttons and hidden features to manhandle you text into something that might resemble some form of “layout” is a clear sign you are on a road where “hell” is just around the corner. When I see people struggle (trying to) work with word, its feels more like they are fighting their content than writing their content. In my quest to find something more elegant I have started to make the distinction between “word processors” and “text editors”. The former are there to make things look good on paper (and come with a talking paperclip to annoy the hell out of you), the latter are more focused on getting your stuff out there.
I have nostalgically perused things like Tilde and Micro as TUI echoes of the good old days of Wordperfect. In the end I went for Obsidian. Why? Because it’s simple. Yeah. I know 50000 hours of Youtube video’s disagree with me and you can turn Obsidian into a positronic matrix that is on the verge of being self aware. But me? I’m just shoving textfiles into folders and i”m done. In the end it works great. Your content isn’t stored in a magical database and your writings can be pulled out as simple markdown files. Obsidian is what note Notepad wanted to be if it ever got a scholarship, and I am happy with that.
Archiving music
In my constant fight against the algo-net where mathematical formula’s spoonfeed me endless playlists of rented music, I want to OWN my tunes again. This means: Building my own library of tunes that I love.
And I love Youtube. Youtube is this wonderful place where you can find the most talented musicians and amateurs who have so far shunned the light of the mainstream music industry. Their music is weird and niche. A cover of the Doctor Who theme played on Violin? A Vangelis Tribute played on synths in somebodies boudoir bedroom?
A dark country version of “in the air tonight” or a 4 hour Blade Runner atmospheric mix? Youtube is FILLED with music, time to grab it! For years yt-dlp has been the command I”ve punched in on the terminal to get just about anything from anywhere. As a demanding lover it needs to be updated regularly and has a command line synthax that gives the enigma code a run for it’s money. So I found Parabolic as a simple front end to this madness. Copy and paste the url, select audio (or video) and be patient. The output has a recognisable filename and even some id3 tags so everything can be nicely archived in your own library.
File syncing.
The fun part of having multiple devices is having your files spread across multiple locations and storage media. Sure there is “the cloud” and you could pay some major company with headquarters shaped like an anus muscle 5 bucks a month to let them store and sniff your data on their big servers but … you can also do it yourself. For that I have been relying on Syncthing as my goto solution. Cross Platfom (look for the Mobius Sync if you want to run it on IOS) it syncs the home directory of my laptop across to my phone and my tablet. Easy and quite reliable (We even use it for our business synthinc thousands of images across our network between our NAS drives and the local storage on our workstations).
Private networking.
And perhaps one of the nicest discoveries I use every single day, is Tailscale. Think of Tailscale as your own little network dragged across the internet. Tailscale is a virtual “switch” and with the tailscale client on each of your devices you have invisible network cables running to that switch, wherever you are. Traffic inbetween your devices is encrypted and Tailscale scoffs wholehartedly at firewalls and closed ports linking your digital devices as if you where at home. Tailscale can do a lot more, but we will get into that in a later episode where we talk security until your dog slides into a coma.
How I install
The apps I listed above are not the only apps I use but I can say for sure that I haven”t compiled a single one from source. Why? I have better things to do. These days you have a slew of package managers (snap, flatpack, brew, pip) that allow you to find and install apps using your mousepointer or a ridiculously simple command. You know what? If it works, it works. The goal of my laptop is to be used to do stuff WITH my apps, not to get a degree in Unix. If you start screaming that “this is not the way”, byte me; Get a beardtrimmer and a pair of comfy sandals.
Where I use my laptop.
Ok, now here comes the strange part. I hardly move my laptop around. First of all because it’s a little too big for comfort. I’m a small guy and lugging around a 15 inch pingpong table (with a great keyboard and a massive display) might not scream “ergonomics”. Plus I hate to be that guy on the train or in the coffeeplace that eats up all the tablespace. I also believe portable computer devices should preferably stick to a size of an average notebook. That puts the 13 inch smack in the sweetspot. I am happy to trade in screen real estate for portability, thats why got created HDMI ports. So mostly I use my laptop at home. It’s in my den upstairs and I also use it to do some “server stuff” (more on that later).
In the end
One of the things that might have come as a surprise to me while writing this episode, is that “my laptop” does not get a lot of use. At least not as a “desktop interface”. There once was a time where I thought of desktops with their clunky boxes and large screens were no longer relevant. Where everything I could or wanted to do, could be achieved on my laptop. All I needed was a docking station and … here you go. But in my personal life my laptop feels like it’s going the way of the DoDo too.
I’m not saying the form factor is no longer relevant, but the way I have setup my digital landscape is not so much device as it is service oriented. I”ve become this new “cross device slider” that would like to do anything on anywhere. Regardless of what kind of “device” it might be. Does this mean I could live life without a “real computer” ? Relying on the apps on my phone or my tablet and some cloud services? Maybe. But i’m not ready to try that out just yet because there is one more important role this device takes to the stage ….
But there is more.
At this very moment my laptop sits upstairs in my den. It’s screen blanked out, its keyboard and trackpad untouched… But it is not idle. Telltale lights on the network interface betray activity. Very briefly a short burst of fan noise tells the tale of a hard working cpu. Invisible and silent the solid state hard-drives move data along their magnetic services. Under the hood my “laptop” is performing another task that is crucial in my digital life… The one of a “companion device” …
But that is something … for the next episode.